In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, which is set in New Orleans, the narrator and a friend go to see a movie, a fiction, but one that was filmed in New Orleans. They see streets and neighborhoods thy know and share an idea: that when you see a familiar street or neighborhood in a movie, it becomes “certified,” and more real, to you. The narrator says, “If [a person] sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”
FD thinks things are very different now. Watching the seemingly endless images from Haiti are not making that part of the world more real, but rather less real, and FD would argue this is true even if one has been a frequent visitor and knows those streets and neighborhoods. The way in which both the “networks” and the 24-hour news channels pour images out into the world seems to FD to make what we see on them less and less real, not more real to us. Images on the screen that are of “real” events and places are sometimes interrupted by fictional images of a fictional reality, and always by advertisements that may even be animations that do not even pretend to reality. Surrounded, engulfed, by these images, we become more and more immune to any real response to them.